I suppose the one benefit of insomnia is being able to post weekly memes early enough that being on PST doesn’t serve as a penalty, so here we are –

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS!
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

“For all the complaints his neighbors came up with, Allan thought Castro Street was getting more like it used to be when he was a kid; for the first time in years, it seemed like a small town again where everybody knew each other and said hi on the street. Now Castro Street could also show that gays and straights could live together and get along just fine.”

This teaser is from page 94 of Randy Shilts’s The Mayor of Castro Street, a biography of Harvey Milk, which my partner and I are both reading right now. I’m only 40-some pages into it, and I’m enjoying the story bits more than the politics, which is typical for me – in books, and honestly in all aspects of life, my mind tends to wander off and get lost when too many names and dates are thrown my way. Rachel and I are both finding that this one reads quickly in some places and drags pretty significantly in others; Shilts’s style flops between journalistic and conversational, which seems to contribute directly to the “easiness” of the read in various spots. Though he tries to present the facts in a manner that is at once informative and engaging, he hasn’t much of a unique voice, in my opinion; it feels like more of a data dump than a storytelling, which is really too bad. Reading this definitely makes me want to watch Milk again, though, which is as good a reason as any to have picked it up. Maybe I’ll see if Rachel’s up for it when we both finish the book, and I’ll point you to her review over on Popcorn Popper.

Also, linking to LibraryThing above made me realize that we own three copies of this book, and not one of them is in the catalog yet – must remedy the LT backlog!

So how about you, what are you reading this fine Tuesday?